This summer Asia Tour Specialist, Lindsay, helped her friends and neighbors Stephen Schuit and Marsha Greenberg find and plan a bike tour in Vietnam. Schuit and Greenberg are American expats living and teaching English in South Korea. They chose to do the guided Dragon’s Tail Tour starting in Dalat and going north to Hoi-An. Both Schuit and Greenberg have traveled extensively in Asia, but this was their first tour by bike. Both wrote about their experience. Here is a he said/she said travel log of their tour.
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Steve and Marsha celebrated their 30th wedding anniversary while cycling in Vietnam.[/caption]
Day 4- Thursday, Departing: Pleiku Destination: PleiKan (near the Laotian border)
Marsha
After a good night’s sleep we got up to overcast skies. My first thought was that the day would be cooler than the previous days and riding would be easy. We got into the van and headed out of town. Just as we were about to mount our bikes the sky opened and the rain came pouring down. As I watched Steve and Vinh continue to get ready to ride I thought they were crazy and I decided that the new book Steve had given me was calling my name. I told them I wouldn’t be biking just yet, got back in the van and started my new book. Mihn, the driver and I sat in the van with rain beating against the roof and read. After about an hour we headed out to catch up with the brave, or insane, bikers. The rain slowed down and a few hours later I was on my bike joining the ride.
By now, I was used to my bike, the hills and the solitude of biking. My thoughts went to the war and I realized we were biking right through the towns that many of my friends had trudged through during the war. The surreal quality was a little overwhelming and I spent most of the day reminiscing in my head about days and loves gone by. We biked close to Laos and I imagined how easy it was during the war to move across boarders without even knowing it. Life is full of amazing coincidences. This day we biked right through the village where my friend Nick died just 10 days after having arrived in Vietnam in 1968. Here I was 45 years later, smiling and connecting to all the people we met. How had their lives been affected by that useless war? I wished I could have talked for hours to so many of them.
Vihn was always ready to answer my questions and to talk about his father’s experience that I assumed was not easy.
By the time we reached our destination for the day, I was both physically and emotionally spent. This bike trip has been so much more than just mounting a bike each day and riding 30 miles. It was filled with wonder, emotions, laughter, food and new friendships. As Steve and I got into bed that night I was grateful that at 64 I can do this with relative ease and that my frame of reference about Vietnam was greater than I even imagined.
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Scenes from Vietnam. Photo credit: Steve Schuit[/caption]
Steve
As we were getting ready to start our day from the Pleiku Reservoir just outside the city, the skies opened and the winds unfurled. Suddenly, the thought of biking was unappealing. But we donned our rain parkas and hit the road undaunted. Surprisingly, the rain had a cleansing effect--washing away all my distractions and concerns. The roads led us though Vietnamese villages carved out of jungle during the last few decades. Rice fields, forests of rubber trees and coffee plantations lay quietly behind the roads and spread to the horizon. We biked in and out of small cities heading north and west, ending our day just miles from the border with Laos.
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